Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck

This is a strange almost ghostly story about place. A landscape, earth and water, is formed over millennia. And then a house is built on the shores of the lake. As the politics of the German twentieth century unfold, the house changes hands. The Jewish family are forced to sell, for half the market value, to the German architect who works with Speers on the Germania project. He renovates the house with love. At the end of the war, it is occupied by the Russians. Under the GDR, the architect must also flee because he has done business with the west and faces imprisonment. Returning exiles from Siberia claim the place. There is a court case over illegal possession. And they then sell the house. Through all of this the character of the gardener appears, going through is routine of lovingly managing the grounds and the boatshed and the woodshed, opening and closing the house as summer moves in to winter, dismantling and re-erecting the wharf for the summer season. There is a sort of poetic movement about all this, and of course that’s reflected in the lovely language. Erpenbeck tells the story of the house as a detached observer, describing the thoughts of her characters but never allowing them anything other than an internal life, as it were. What is horrifying though are the vignettes of utter, despicable violence, the no holds barred cruelty of humankind, which are all the more searing because of the tranquility of the setting. This is an old book, published in 2008 I think, but a classic.

One Hundred Years of Dirt by Rick Morton

Journalist Rick Morton really exposes his belly in this honest and arresting memoir. Born into a family who owned millions of acres of land beyond the dingo fence, (we’re talking Birdsville Track territory here), Morton grew up in the shadow of a violent, unpredictable father. His mother took the three kids and left when he was about seven, and then began years of living below the poverty line in a small town an hour and a half inland from the Gold Coast. He talks about why poverty is endemic, about how and why the poor have very little hope of escaping, about the role of luck in life, and about the role of desperation. He addresses issues that most people are shy of confronting – his brother’s ice addiction and his surprise that he escaped the same fate. It’s not as if he made wise decisions about his life, he says, it’s simply that he responded to the horrors of their lives in a different way from his brother. He talks abut the marginalisation of ‘other’ groups, such as homosexuals, about the latest research showing the genetic makeup can be altered by poverty, about depression, about the traumas of childhood that mould who you are and your behaviours as an adult. His thesis is that most people cannot and do not escape poverty and his arguments are compelling, to say the least. Yet there’s no self pity here. And it’s certainly not a misery memoir of the kind so popular a couple of decades ago. But he’s certainly angry about the type of society that institutionalises poverty, all the while looking the other way.